What do you use to backup your personal files in 2019?

Question

Hey HN,I'm trying to pick a tool that will require little work on my part, and will safely and affordably backup my personal files. That's photos, documents, movies, and all other sorts of stuff I might have accumulated over many years of being a computer user / hoarder.The requirements are:* I would store around 10 TB of data, of all types of files, but mostly made of RAW photos.* Everything is in one place* Everything is stored in the cloud, with some pretty high guarantees or the data not being lostSome options I've used / considered:* Dropbox - not that much space, but overall pretty convenient, even though it's not clear how easy it is to lose files in it if you accidentally delete something* Backblaze - infinite space, but you have to have your external drives plugged in every 30 days to prevent it from deleting those files, which is a hassle* Arq + S3/Glacier/B2 - more manual effort, and also could get more expensive, e.g. $40/mo at 10TB for storage alone. Also experienced some corruption issues in buggy past versions of Arq.Please advise.

ColinWright · Accepted Answer

I use four external multi-TB drives, swap them around every couple of days, and run rsync to copy existing files into a directory with name of the current date and time, with hard links to the previous backup. This gives a live current copy of the existing files, but reduces storage requirements by not duplicating files every time I backup.
Those drives get carried around haphazardly, are often in different physical locations, and usually only differ in content by at most a week of data.
But I'm odd, happy to write my own scripts, and don't want to trust cloud-based solutions for my personal data.
By the way, I regularly pull randomly selected files from the backups to test that they exist and are readable. Backups aren't backups unless you can restore from them, a lesson I learned the hard way three decades ago.
Also:
* What has changed since you asked this 6 years ago[0]?
* What have you already tried?
* What are you using now?
* What is your experience?
* Why don't the solutions offered there work for you?
* Will you share your experience with us?
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6708474

seanlane · Answer

I use syncthing to sync photos and videos from my phone, and my wife's, to a home server. Then gmvault to backup my GMail account locally.
From there, I use restic to make a first copy to an external hard drive, and then a second copy goes to Backblaze's B2 service, so there's three copies on two different mediums, with one copy off-site.
It's been rock solid over the past year or two, and the cost is about $2.50/mo with B2, storing around 450GB. Restic has been bullet proof; when I thought it was failing, turned out that a stick of faulty RAM was the true culprit.